@People who disagree with James Damore's memo

Do you believe that men and women have the same biology? If so, then should we stop segregating sports competitions by gender? What would you think about having a man fight a woman in a UFC octagon?

If you're going to say that physical abilities are not analogous to mental/psychological inclinations, then my next question would be is neuroscience just a pseudoscience? Because the consensus in neuroscience is that "form follows function" and male and female brains are definitely different anatomically speaking (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/).

Also I mean NO offense to anyone. I am genuinely looking for a cogent argument from the people who disagreed with Damore's memo.

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Men and women have different biology and different brain structure. They also have different hormonal balance which affects mood and disposition. Anyone who disagrees with that simple reality is kidding themselves.

Where the memo is dead wrong is where he's trying to justify which gender makes a better software engineer because we don't fucking know. Not only that, we don't even have a real canonical set of metrics that define a software engineer. What we have is a set of business metrics we care to see and both genders have shown equal level of capability against those loosely defined arbitrary business metrics.

Furthermore the memo questions the value of trainings specialized for one gender. That is also wrong because historically and presently the opportunities are not equal for both genders due to biases still present so if we want equal outcomes for both genders then we need to reverse some of the damage done to one of them in the space of availability of opportunities.

That’s exactly what equal opportunity is. That we all have the chance to succeed if we put in the work. Etc etc.

Equal outcomes is exactly what it says. No matter what, outcomes are equal. It’s basic English. You shouldn’t call people narrow-minded when you’re the one conflating equal opportunity and outcome.

Your heart’s in the right place, clearly, and I guess we agree. Equal opportunity. An equal chance to succeed. An equal multiplier applied to effort. So many of us want that. And I like to believe the best of people and I think many of us have good intentions with our views.

But there is no complexity about the phrase “equal outcome”. Nothing deep or “wide-minded” to be perceived there. It is exactly what it says.

No, it doesn't. But I'm sure many are wondering if I'm female or a feminist. I'm neither. It's just good strategy to reward performance, not gender. Women do great things just as much as men and if we continue to be shitty to them as a society then we are squandering their potential.

By the way, wasn’t it discovered at Google recently that women were earning slightly more than men for the same work?

Your enthusiasm in alleging and condemning discrimination appears to have no more impact than preaching to the choir.

I don’t think anybody here, nor James Damore, was advocating for women to be treated in a “shitty” manner or discriminated against in terms of ‘x’.

And by the way, the data on the gender “pay gap” isn’t as emphatic in either direction as your claim that “women are paid less for the same work done”. Particularly in big tech, which I assume is the context here.

The chart shows comparative participation rate, not performance. It could be cause by either fewer women doing it or more men doing it, we don't know from the chart.

Yes it's probably caused by social factors, which could be changes in the field which made computer science more appealing to men or less appealing to girls, or due to marketing of computer products in general (computers being marketed as toys for boys while Barbie being marketed for girls in the 80s for example) or various other factors that are not necessarily classified as oppression or hostile environment towards women.

“This Kleenex is for men, so there must be some different needs in tissues and so I’ll go with the one for men just to be safe... it surely can’t be the case that they simply put tissues in a black and chrome box instead of one with flowers on it!”

How much of the crowd here claiming women and men are different in body but not in mind claimed until recently that there are no biological differences to begin with. In other words, different hormon levels, different physical attributes don't manifest into mental differences?! And mental differences don't lead in any way to different life choices? 🤣🤣

Yes Microsoft its close to 50%. My undergrad in CS back in India was close to 50% females in class. My masters in US had same amount of asian men and women. In my 4 teams in 10 years in US, I had the same ratio of asian men and women. It was the white and black women that were missing.

Damore's "memo" was pseudoscience based more on stereotype than on research. Even if you think there are differences it's unlikely they are the stereotypical things he put in the memo.

He would quote some research and then extrapolate it ridiculously in stereotypical ways.

One example (there are very many examples but I only need one to illustrate the problem):

He quoted a study that showed women had marginally lower performance on a rote task when they were subject to physical discomfort. The study called this discomfort "stress", though they made no claim it represents anything other than physical discomfort.

Damore then extrapolated in two ridiculous ways:

1. He assumed he could use this as proof women don't handle any kind of stress well

And

2. He assumed he could equate this rote task to technology work

None of that is logical or scientific, that's just him randomly listing an article that used the word "stress" and then spewing a garbage stereotype. That type pseudoscience extrapolation and stereotype exists in almost all he wrote. In almost every case the study he listed had no valid relationship to the conclusion he tried to draw.

People were upset not by “the science” but by this guy arguing tired sexist tropes about his co-workers with a thin veneer of appealing to “science”. (I’m sure at some point in the 1800s some social-Darwinist said, “Social-Darwinism is pseudoscience? my word, you don’t think evolution is science!”)

People use to make similar arguments that black folks naturally wanted to be nannies and servants or porters because more complex tasks were biologically beyond their interest or reach.

Funny that in Damore’s intro he includes ethnicity... but then never makes the case like he attempts for gender. Maybe pulling some studies about biological differences by ethnicity and then arguing that black people like to work low-paid jobs was a little too obviously social-Darwinist for him to attempt?